feminist blogs

Regina McKnight at her post conviction hearing

Great news: Regina McKnight, a South Carolina woman who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for homicide by child abuse after she gave birth to a still-born baby, has had her conviction overturned.

McKnight is one of about 200 women who have been arrested for the crime of using drugs while pregnant. The women who are brought to trial are usually charged with either child abuse or drug trafficking — the “trafficking” act happening in utero. This is an issue of particular interest to me, and I’m tempted to write a long post about it, but a final paper calls. So, check out these old posts for background:

Help Pregnant Drug Addicts, Don’t Jail Them
Prosecuting Neo-Natal Drug Use: A Public Health Issue
Prosecuting Pregnant Drug-Addicted Mothers

And I would be remiss not to mention the fantastic work of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who have worked tirelessly to put this issue in the spotlight. Check out this piece in particular about Ms. McKnight’s ordeal.

Don’t you just love how much “pro-lifers” care about babies once they’re born?

The Bush administration violated federal law last year when it restricted states’ ability to provide health insurance to children of middle-income families, and its new policy is therefore unenforceable, lawyers from the Government Accountability Office said Friday.

Anti-choice Republicans were concerned that the children’s health care program would “crowd out” private insurer’s ability to make lots of money. And so the White House rejected a proposal from New York that would have covered an additional 70,000 children.

Gotta love the GOP: Where the concern for life ends at birth.

This is what happens when “pro-life” policies dominate.

In Nigeria abortion is illegal unless the life of the woman would be at risk if she were to give birth.

But the Guttmacher Institute estimates that more than 456,000 unsafe abortions are done in Nigeria every year.

Some women go to traditional healers to terminate their pregnancies.

Methods include trying to break the amniotic sack inside the womb with a sharp stick. This causes infection and in extreme cases the tissue inside the body can start to die.

“They’re pulling out intestines,” says gynaecologist Dr Ejike Oji, of Ipas, an international organisation working to secure reproductive rights for women.

Another method is to pump a toxic mixture of fiercely hot Alligator chilli peppers and chemicals like alum into their bodies.

“The women go into toxic shock and die,” Dr Oji said.

27 women every day. 10,000 women every year. And that’s in Nigeria alone.

Thank a pro-lifer today.

Thanks to Susan for the link.

A guest-post by Kelly Castagnaro, Director of Communications at the International Women’s Health Coalition.

Despite evidence—and the efforts of Rep. Betty McCollum, experts and advocates around the world—the full House voted yesterday to reauthorize a $50 billion global HIV/AIDS relief initiative that threatens to further restrict, rather than support, expansion of HIV prevention through family planning services.

Several advocates and the mainstream media have overwhelmingly touted the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as a legacy-building success, and in one case, the “AIDS relief miracle.” Today, nearly two million more people have access to anti-retroviral medication than five years ago due to U.S. government support. However, the number of people newly infected with HIV continues to outpace the number of people on treatment —hardly a miraculous approach to sustainable public health programming.

For women and girls, HIV/AIDS is fundamentally a sexual and reproductive health and rights issue. They are vulnerable because their rights are widely violated. More than four-fifths of new infections in women occur in marriage or long term relationships. They could be protected if their access to reproductive health services and education was expanded. They could be protected if bureaucrats in Washington didn’t insist on exporting faulty abstinence and faithfulness prevention programming to communities where women cannot abstain and are already faithful.

But the real tragedy is that lawmakers have missed the opportunity to take a step towards ending, rather than managing, the pandemic by refusing to talk about sex. Sexual transmission is a leading cause of new infections worldwide. However, hysteria surrounding abortion and premarital sex has prevented lawmakers from engaging in debate about what works and what doesn’t for people who are fighting this disease in their homes, in their communities and in their countries.

Public health experts on the ground must be able to determine the best mix of prevention programming. As it stands, their hands are tied by mandates from Washington politicos who can only talk about sex publicly when their extramarital affairs and indiscretions are exposed.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved a similar $50 billion bill, which the full Senate will soon consider. Let’s hope they recognize that there are no quick fixes to the global AIDS pandemic, and find a way to help women deal with their lives and their health in a humane way.

Word. Obama at a town hall meeting:

“When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include — which should include abstinence education and teaching the children — teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include — it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”

Emphasis mine.

A baby shouldn’t be a punishment — but that’s exactly what babies become when you force pregnancy on someone. The “pro-life” movement very much uses forced pregnancy as a slut-punishing tool, placing children squarely in the category of “punishment” rather than “joy.” Yet somehow they manage to argue that they’re the ones who actually care about children — even as they cut off children’s health care; even as 100 percent of the worst legislators of children are “pro-life;” even as they think babies should be physically forced on women instead of joyfully and openly wanted.

Good on Obama for calling that out, however quietly.

Perhaps we should be focusing on the fear-mongering and outright lying on behalf of anti-choicers. Amanda tackles the hypocrisy of Wright’s critics — the same people who attack him for repeating inaccurate messages about HIV/AIDS were the primary architects of Bush’s anti-science, deadly HIV/AIDS policies abroad.

And while Wright’s conspiracy theories about where HIV came from are a little whacked out, when you know the history of medical experimentation on people of color, you can understand his paranoia a little better. Heck, even today, people of color tend to receive medical care from lower-skilled professionals, and are more likely to be “teaching subjects” than white people.

None of that is to say that his statements about HIV are correct. But Wright is only Obama’s pastor, and he has never been invited to influence policy — unlike, say, Jerry Thacker, a man who called AIDS a “gay plague” and homosexuality a “death style” and was rewarded with a nomination from President Bush to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS.

And the mainstream anti-choice movement spreads all kinds of lies about HIV/AIDS and other diseases — except they don’t keep it in the pulpit, they bring it into the classroom. A large anti-choice website — prolife.com — “warns” people about condoms, implying that HIV can penetrate microscopic holes in latex and flat-out stating that condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31% of the time. The site also says that “one out of every three teenage couples using condoms will become pregnant each year.” They further falsely claim that all STDs can be spread without exchanging body fluids:

STDs are frequently passed through “skin to skin” contact even when condoms are used. This can happen because the bacterial or viral germs that cause many serious STDs (such as human papillomavirus, chlamydia, herpes, and syphilis) do not infect just one place on your body. They may infect anywhere in the male or female genital areas.

So, even if the virus or bacteria isn’t passed through tears or holes in the condom itself, you can still get diseases because condoms don’t cover or protect all areas of the genital region. That means condoms don’t prevent many of the STD infections that take place during sexual contact.

This is what young people are learning from “pro-life” groups. And anti-choice groups are being well-funded by federal abstinence-only dollars to teach this kind of BS in the public school classroom.

But, yes, let’s be upset that Rev. Wright made a ridiculous statement about the origins of HIV to his church. After all, that will have absolutely no effect at all on what people do when it comes to HIV/AIDS prevention, but it’s a tasty news tidbit to bandy about in an effort to make Obama look like a run-of-the-mill crazy/paranoid/racially-divisive black man. Why would the mainstream media take a step back from the headline du jour and instead worry about the millions of people here and abroad who are being told that condoms don’t work to prevent HIV? After all, that won’t have any negative public health consequences, right?

Dolores Huerta has spent her entire life advocating for workers’ rights and social justice. She is one of the most well-regarded progressive leaders in this country. She epitomizes progressive values, and is a phenomenal human rights leader.

But because she’s pro-choice, her speaking events at Catholic schools are being canceled — even though the events had nothing to do with reproductive rights, and she wasn’t planning on talking about abortion or contraception.

Good to know that the Catholic church cares about social justice — as long as you can pass the misogyny litmus test first.

In Maryland, pro-choicers have pushed for a bill that would require so-called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” to inform women that they are not health care providers and that they are under no legal obligation to tell the truth. In practice, these centers routinely lie to women in order to coerce them out of terminating their pregnancies. They pose as health care providers when they aren’t, offering ultrasounds but not having qualified doctors on site to actually read them. They flat-out lie about abortion and contraception.

So it would be nice if they were required to tell the truth, but of course that won’t happen. The last part of the article, though, is pretty great:

Delegate Joseph Bartlett, a Frederick County Republican, said the centers should be able to continue to operate normally.

“The premise that we’re going to require these organizations to disclaim that they don’t have to tell the truth is just about the silliest thing I ever heard,” he said. “We certainly don’t do that in the case of politicians, do we?”

Well, no, we don’t, but perhaps we should.

“Pro-life” lawmakers have targeted Native women in their latest anti-choice bill — led this time by prostitute-hiring family warrior David Vitter.

The controversy swirls around a federal law—known as the Hyde amendment—that prohibits abortion coverage under Medicaid, Medicare and Indian Health Service programs. While the Hyde law must be renewed by Congress each year, the Vitter amendment—which the Senate approved on Feb. 26—would apply Hyde’s restrictions permanently to IHS beneficiaries. For that reason, tribal health advocates charge that the Vitter language treads on the sovereignty of Indian communities and places unique constraints on native women.

“It’s a very racist amendment,” said Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, “[because] it puts another layer of restrictions on the only race of people whose health care is governed primarily by the federal government. All women are subject to the Hyde amendment, so why would they put another set of conditions on us?”

I’m pretty sure she already knows the answer to that: Because Native women are easy targets.

Do read the whole article — it does a great job of detailing why this is important, and explains how Native women are sexually victimized at extremely high rates.

But it’s not only Republicans who are going after Native womens’ rights. Several Democratic senators voted to pass the bill, including Sens. Ken Salazar (Col.), Evan Bayh (Ind.), Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Robert Casey (Pa.), Tim Johnson (S.D.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.).

If any of those senators represent you, consider writing a letter to let them know that attacking Native womens’ access to health care is not a Democratic value.

Good baby:

Bad baby:


“Pro-life” politicians in Virginia are cutting off hundreds of thousands of dollars in preventative services at Planned Parenthood.

The Virginia Senate voted Wednesday to cut off state funding to Planned Parenthood of Virginia because it offers abortions, an action that could endanger hundreds of thousands of dollars in state aid for women’s health-care programs.

The decision, a major setback for the Senate’s new Democratic majority, marks the first time in more than a decade that the Senate has decided against giving state aid to the organization because of its abortion-related activities.

Let’s be clear: Federal aid, and state aid from Virginia, are not paying for abortions. They are paying for pre-natal care, women’s health care, birth control, and sexual health education. Millions of women across the country benefit from those programs — and I’m one of them. I’ve used Planned Parenthood’s health care services in New York and in Washington State for annual exams and birth control when I didn’t have insurance. Without Planned Parenthood, I simply would not have been able to see a women’s health provider. I would not have been able to afford birth control. Planned Parenthood provides crucial services, and it does real damage to all sorts of women (but mostly lower-income and uninsured women) when those services are cut off in the name of “pro-life” politics. It also makes it more difficult for women to take care of the babies they already have when you make it harder for them to prevent pregnancy.

It also jacks up the abortion rate when women don’t have the resources to prevent pregnancy. If you make birth control expensive or inaccessible, it doesn’t mean that people will stop having sex — it just means that they’ll have riskier sex. It means that more women will get pregnant when they don’t want to. And that means that more women will terminate pregnancies.

It’s not rocket science, it’s common sense. And if “pro-life” legislators actually cared about saving fetuses (and born people), they’d be championing Planned Parenthood as the organization that has prevented more abortions in this country than any other. They’d be throwing money toward birth control, sex education, and HIV/AIDS programs.

Instead, they’re cutting them off.

And because they care about children so much, Virginia pro-life Republicans are also trying to cut teachers’ salaries by $227 million.

Thanks to ElleBeMe for the link.